Sci-Fi roundup: January 15

David Langford reviews the latest sci-fi books including Christopher
Fowler and Chris Beckett.

Photo: Portia Webb

By David Langford

5:37PM GMT 19 Jan 2012

Hell’s always a popular destination in fiction: Christopher Fowler’s Hell Train (Solaris, £7.99) is steaming hellwards across 1916 Carpathia. Lurid horrors await its four live passengers, paying homage to the gory heyday of Hammer films. A 1962 frame-story stars a Hammer scriptwriter; why was his movie never made? Non-stop, ghoulish fun.

The Demi-Monde: Spring (Jo Fletcher, £18.99) is book two of Rod Rees’s exuberant cyberhell sequence, set in a madly overcrowded virtual reality. This steampunk Demi-Monde of jammed-together, warring cities is seeded with recreated psychopaths like de Sade, Robespierre and Reinhard Heydrich – whose Nazi “ForthRight” regime plans the Final Solution. All this plus vampires and Zeppelins!

Cyberhells with viral demons reappear in Paul McAuley’sIn the Mouth of the Whale(Gollancz, £18.99), a tale of space war in a remote solar system. A second wave of human colonists who enslaved the first, is now attacked by a third. Meanwhile, the oldest interstellar ship nears, carrying a female messiah… McAuley excels at plausible future science.

Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden (Corvus, £18.99) pictures a failing human colony on a sunless world whose ecology runs on geothermal energy. Alien wildlife in a valley of luminous trees provided food for the original marooned Adam and Eve, but not their 532 descendants. Only our young hero dreams of crossing the hellish “Snowy Dark” which surrounds this enclave. A classic theme, beautifully told.